March 15, 2017

Ad Industry's Dangerous, Misguided Policy

A coalition of advertising trade associations joined the Trump administration yesterday in calling for the rejection of an FCC regulation created to protect consumers by restricting the collection and sharing of personal information by internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T.

The regulation would have given consumers far more control over their personal information by requiring them to opt-in before the ISPs could use or sell their personal information.

The actions of the advertising industry in this instance are deplorable -- but hardly surprising. The ad industry is losing its grip. We can't control ourselves.

Jonathan Schwantes of the Consumers Union has said,
"Consumers deserve to know—and have a say in—who is collecting certain
information about them and how it’s used."

Listen to this bullshit from the 4A's, AAF, ANA, DMA and IAB...

"Without prompt action in Congress or at the FCC, the FCC's regulations
would break with well-accepted and functioning industry practices,
chilling innovation and hurting the consumers the regulation was
supposed to protect."

Yeah, right. Well-accepted practices like stalking us, selling our personal information to the highest bidder, enabling creeps and criminals to hack info about us. We wouldn't want to deprive them of innovations like that. Heck no.

It's not bad enough that the amount of information online marketers and media companies now have about us is alarming. Now we have to let Comcast and AT&T into our pants.

What is it going to take to make the ad industry understand what we are enabling?

Everything the ad tech industry and the online media honchos have ever told us about privacy and security has turned out to be 100% undiluted horseshit. They are incompetent, irresponsible, and dangerous. They cannot be trusted with private information about us.

It's time for sensible, responsible people in the advertising and marketing industry to get off their asses and do something about this.

Along with some others, I am speaking at the World Federation of Advertisers next month in Toronto on the subject of tracking and adtech. It will be an audience of hundreds of the world's largest marketers who are unlikely to be sympathetic to my point of view.

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans.""As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."